A Rose for Emily (1930)

A Rose for Emily

by William Faulkner
I

When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through
a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see
the inside of her house, which no one save an old manservant— a combined gardener and cook-
had seen in at least ten years.

It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas
and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what
had once been our most select street. But garages and cotton gins had encroached and
obliterated even the august names of that neighbourhood; only Miss Emily's house was left,
lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wago ns and the gasoline pumps-an
eyesore among eyesores. And now Miss Emily had gone to join the representatives of those
august names where they lay in the cedarbemused cemetery among the ranked and
anonymous graves of Union and Confederate soldiers who fell at the battle of Jefferson.

Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary
obligation upon the town, dating from that day in 1894 when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor-he
who fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron-
remitted her taxes, the dispensation dating from the death of her father on into perpetuity.
Not that Miss' Emily would have accepted charity. Colonel Sartoris invented an involved tale
to the effect that Miss Emily's father had loaned money to the town, which the town, as a
matter of business, preferred this way of repaying. Only a man of Colonel Sartoris' generation
and thought could have

invented it, and only a woman could have believed it.

When the next generation, with its more modem ideas, became mayors and aldermen,
this arrangement created some little dissatisfaction. On the first of the year they mailed her a
tax notice. February came, and there was no reply. They wrote her a formal letter, asking her
to call at the sheriff s office at her convenience. A week later the mayor wrote her himself,
offering to call or to send his car for her, and received in reply a note on paper of an archaic
shape, in a thin, flowing calligraphy in faded ink, to the effect that she no longer went out at
all.

The tax notice was also enclosed, without comment.

They called a special meeting of the Board of Aldermen. A deputation waited upon
her, knocked at the door through which no visitor had passed since she ceased giving china-
painting lessons eight or ten years earlier. They were admitted by the old Negro into a dim
hall from which a staircase mounted into still more shadow. It smelled of dust and disuse -a
close, dank smell. The Negro led them into the parlour. It was furnished in heavy, leather-
covered furniture. When the Negro opened the blinds of one window, they could see that the
leather was cracked; and when they sat down, a faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs,
spinning with slow motes in the single sunray. On a tarnished gilt easel before the fireplace
stood a crayon portrait of Miss Emily's father.

They rose when she entered-a small, fat woman in black, with a thin gold chain
descending to her waist and vanishing into her belt, leaning on an ebony cane with a
tarnished gold head. Her skeleton was small and spare; perhaps that was why what would
have been merely plumpness in another was obesity in her. She looked bloated, like a body
long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue. Her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges
of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough as they moved
from one face to another while the visitors stated their errand.

She did not ask them to sit. She just stood in the door and listened quietly until the
spokesman came to a stumbling halt. Then they could hear the invisible watch ticking at the
end of the gold chain.

Her voice was dry and cold. 'I have no taxes in Jefferson. Colonel Sartoris explained it
to me. Perhaps one of you can gain access to the city records and satisfy yourselves.'

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"But we have. We are the city authorities. Miss Emily. Didn't you get notice from the
sheriff, signed by him?"

"I received a paper, yes,' Miss Emily said. 'Perhaps he considers he self the sheriff... I
have no taxes in Jefferson."

"But there is nothing on the books to show that, you see. We must go, by the-"

"See Colonel Sartoris. I have no taxes in Jefferson."

"But, Miss Emily..."

"See Colonel Sartoris, (Colonel Sartoris had been dead almost ten years.) I have no
taxes in Jefferson. Tobe!" The Negro appeared. "Show these gentlemen out."

II

So she vanquished them, horse and foot, just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty
years before about the smell. That was two years after her father's death and a short time
after her sweetheart~the one we believe( would marry her -had deserted her. After her
father's death she went out very little; after her sweetheart went away, people hardly saw her
at an. A few of the ladies had the temerity to call, but were not received, and th4 only sign of
life about the place was the Negro man-a young man then-going in and out with a market
basket.

"Just as if a man-any man-could keep a kitchen property," the ladies said; so they were
not surprised when the smell developed. It was another link between the gross, teeming world
and the high and mighty Griersons. A neighbour, a woman complained to the mayor, judge
Stevens, eighty years old.

"But what will you have me do about it, madam?" he said.

"Why, send her word to stop it," the woman said. "Isn't there a law?"

"I'm sure that won't be necessary," judge Stevens said. "It's probably
just a snake or a rat that nigger of hers killed in the yard. I'll speak to him about it."

The next day he received two more complaints, one from a man who came in diffident
deprecation. "We really must do something about it judge. I'd be the last one in the world to
bother Miss Emily, but we've got to do something." That night the Board of Aldermen met-
three grey-beard and one younger man, a member of the rising generation.

"It's simple enough," he said. "Send her word to have her place cleaned up. Give her a
certain time to do it in, and if she don't. . ."

"Dammit, sir," judge Stevens said, "will you accuse a lady to her face of smelling bad?"

So the next night, after midnight, four men crossed Miss Emily's lawn and slunk about
the house like burglars, sniffing along the base of the brickwork and at the cellar openings
while one of them performed a regular sowing motion with his hand out of a sack stung from
his shoulder. They broke open the cellar door and sprinkled lime there, and in all the
outbuildings. As they recrossed the lawn, a window that had been dark was lighted and Miss
Emily sat in it, the light behind her, and her upright torso motionless as that of an idol. They
crept quietly across the lawn and into the shadow of the locusts that lined the street. After a
week or two the smell went away.

That was when people had begun to feel really sorry for her. People in our town, remembering
how old lady Wyatt, her great-aunt, had gone completely crazy at last,

believed that the Griersons held themselves a little too high for what they really were. None
of the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily and such. We had long thought of
them as a tableau; Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a
spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of
them framed by the back-flung front door. So when she got to be thirty and was still single,
we were not pleased exactly, but vindicated; even with insanity in the family she wouldn't
have turned down all of her chances if they had really materialized.

When her father died, it got about that the house was all that was left to her; and in a
way, people were glad. At last they could pity Miss Emily. Being left alone, and a pauper, she
had become humanized. Now she too would know the old thrill and the old despair of a penny
more or less.

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The day after his death all the ladies prepared to call at the house and offer condolence
and aid, as is our custom. Miss Emily met them at the door, dressed as usual and with no
trace of grief on her face. She told them that her father was not dead. She did that for three
days, with the ministers calling on her, and the doctors, trying to persuade her to let them
dispose of the body, just as they were about to resort to law and force, she broke down, and
they buried her father quickly.

We did not say she was crazy then. We believed she had to d o that. We remembered
all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left, she would
have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will.

Ill

She was sick for a long time. When we saw her again, her hair was cut short, making
her look like a girl, with a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows-sort
of tragic and serene.

The town had just let the contracts for paving the sidewalks, and in the summer after
her father's death they began the work. The construction company came with niggers and
mules and machinery, and a foreman named Homer Barron, a Yankee-a big, dark, ready man,
with a big voice and eyes lighter than his face. The little boys would follow in groups to hear
him cuss the niggers, and the niggers singing in time to the rise and fall of picks. Pretty soon
he knew everybody in town.

Whenever you heard a lot of laughing anywhere about the square, Homer
Barron would be in the centre of the group. Presently we began to see him and Miss Emily on
Sunday afternoons driving in the yellow-wheeled buggy and the matched team of bays from
the livery stable.

At first we were glad that Miss Emily would have an interest, be cause the ladies all
said, "Of course a Grierson would not think seriously of a Northerner, a day labourer." But
there were still others, older people, who said that even grief could not cause a real lady to
forget noblesse oblige -without calling it noblesse oblige. They just said, "Poor Emily. Her
kinsfolk should come to her." She had some kin in Alabama; but years ago her father had
fallen out with them over the estate of old lady Wyatt, the crazy woman, and there was no
communication between the two families. They had not even been represented at the funeral.

And as soon as the old people said, "Poor Emily," the whispering began. "Do you
suppose it's really so?" they said to one another. "Of course it is. What else could. . ." This
behind their hands; rustling of craned silk and satin behind jalousies closed upon the sun of
Sunday afternoon as the thin, swift clop -clop-clop of the matched team passed: "Poor Emily."

She carried her head high enough-even when we believed that she was fallen. It was
as if she demanded more than ever the recognition of her dignity as the last Grierson; as if it
had wanted that touch of earthiness to re her imperviousness. Like when she bought the rat
poison, the arsenic. That was over a year after they had begun to say 'Poor Emily," and while
the two female cousins were visiting her.

"I want some poison," she said to the druggist. She was over thirty then, still a slight
woman, though thinner than usual, with cold, haughty black eyes in a face the flesh of which
was strained across the temples and about the eye sockets as you imagine a lighthouse
keeper's face ought to look. "I want some poison," she said.

"Yes, Miss Emily. What kind? For rats and such? I'd recom — "

"I want the best you have. I don't care what kind."
The druggist named several. "They'll kill anything up to an elephant.
But what you want is — "

"Arsenic," Miss Emily said. "Is that a good one?"

"Is.. . arsenic? Yes. ma'am. But what you want — "

"I want arsenic."

The druggist looked down at her. She looked back at him, erect, her
face like a strained flag. "Why, of course," the druggist said. "If that's what you want. But the
law requires you to tell what you are going to use it for."

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Miss Emily just stared at him, her head tilted back in order to look him eye for eye,
until he looked away and went and got the arsenic and wrapped it up. The Negro delivery boy
brought her the package; the druggist didn't come back. When she opened the package at
home there was written on the box under the skull and bones: "For rats."

IV

So the next day we all said, 'She will kill herself ; and we said it would be the best

thing.

When she had first begun to be seen with Homer Barron, we had said, "She will marry

him.

Then we said, "She will persuade him yet," because Homer himself had remarked-he
liked men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men in the Elks' Club-that he
was not a marrying man. Later we said, "Poor Emily" behind the jalousies as they passed on
Sunday afternoon in the glittering buggy, Miss Emily with her head high and Homer Barron
with his hat cocked and a cigar in his teeth, reins and whip in a yellow glove.

Then some of the ladies began to say that it was a disgrace to the town and a bad
example to the young people. The men did not want to interfere, but at last the ladies forced
the Baptist minister-Miss Emily's people were Episcopal -to call upon her. He would never
divulge what happened during that interview, but he refused to go back again. The next
Sunday they again drove about the streets, and the following day the minister's wife wrote to
Miss Emily's relations in Alabama.

So she had blood-kin under her roof again and we sat back to watch developments. At
first nothing happened. Then we were sure that they were to be married. We learned that
Miss Emily had been to the jeweller's and ordered a man's toilet set in silver, with the letters
H. B. on each piece. Two days later we learned that she had bought a complete outfit of men's
clothing, including a nightshirt, and we said, "They are married." We were really glad. We
were glad because the two female cousins were even more Grierson than Miss Emily had ever
been.

So we were surprised when Homer Barron-the streets had been finished some time
since -was gone. We were a little disappointed that there was not a public blowing-off, but we
believed that he had gone on to prepare for Miss Emily's coming, or to give her a chance to get
rid of the cousins. (By that time it was a cabal, and we were all Miss Emily's allies to help
circumvent the cousins.) Sure enough, after another week they departed. And, as we had
expected all along, within three days Homer Barron was back in town. A neighbour saw the
Negro man admit him at the kitchen door at dusk one evening.

And that was the last we saw of Homer Barron. And of Miss Emily for some time. The
Negro man went in and out with the market basket, but the front door remained closed. Now
and then we would see her at a window for a moment, as the men did that night when they
sprinkled the lime, but for almost six months she did not appear on the streets. Then we
knew that this was to be expected too; as if that quality of her father which had thwarted her
woman's life so many times had been too virulent and too furious to die.

When we next saw Miss Emily, she had grown fat and her hair was turning grey.
During the next few years it grew greyer and greyer until it attained an even pepper-and-salt
iron-gray when it ceased turning. Up to the day of her death at seventy -four it was still that
vigorous iron-grey, like the hair of an active man.

From that time on her front door remained closed, save for a period of six or seven years, when
she was about forty, during which she gave lessons in china-painting. She fitted up a studio in
one of the downstairs rooms, where the daughters and grand -daughters of Colonel Sartoris'
contemporaries were sent to her with the same regularity and in the same spirit that they
were sent to church on Sundays with a twenty-five -cent piece for the collection plate.
Meanwhile her taxes had been remitted.

Then the newer generation became the backbone and the spirit of the town, and the
painting pupils grew up and fell away and did not send their children to her with boxes of
colour and tedious brushes and pictures cut from the ladies' magazines. The front door closed

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upon the last one and remained closed for good. When the town got free postal delivery, Miss
Emily alone refused to let them fasten the metal numbers above her door and attach a
mailbox to it. She would not listen to them.

Daily, monthly, yearly we watched the Negro grow greyer and more stooped, going in
and out with the market basket. Each December we sent her a tax notice, which would be
returned by the post office a week later, unclaimed. Now and then we would see her in one of
the downstairs windows-she had evidently shut up the top floor of the house-like the carven
torso of an idol in a niche, looking or not looking at us, we could never tell which. Thus she
passed from generation to generation-dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse.

And so she died. Fell in the house filled with dust and shadows, with only a doddering
Negro man to wait on her. We did not even know she was sick; we had long since given up
trying to get any information from the Negro. He talked to no one, probably not even to her,
for his voice had grown harsh and rusty, as if from disuse.

She died in one of the downstairs rooms, in a heavy walnut bed with a curtain, her gray
head propped on a pillow yellow and moldy with age and lack of sunlight.

V

The Negro met the first of the ladies at the front door and let them in, with their
hushed, sibilant voices and their quick, curious glances, and then disappeared. He walked
right through the house and out the back and was not seen again.

The two female cousins came at once. They held the funeral o n the second day, with
the town coming to look at Miss Emily beneath a mass of bought flowers, with the crayon face
of her father musing profoundly above the bier and the ladies sibilant and macabre; and the
very old men-some in their brushed Confederate uniforms-on the porch and the lawn, talking
of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with
her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do,
to whom

all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite
touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottleneck of the most recent decade of years.

Already, we knew that there was one room in that region above stairs which no one
had seen in forty years, and which would have to be forced. They waited until Miss Emily was
decently in the ground before they opened it.

The violence of breaking down the door seemed to fill this room with pervading dust. A
thin, acrid pall as of the tomb seemed to lie everywhere upon this room decked and furnished
as for a bridal: upon the valance curtains of faded rose colour, upon the rose-shaded lights,
upon the dressing table, upon the delicate array of crystal and the man's toilet things backed
with tarnished silver, silver so tarnished that the monogram was obscured. Among them lay
collar and tie, as if they had just been removed, which, lifted, left upon the surface a pale
crescent in the dust. Upon a chair hung the suit, carefully folded; beneath it the two mute
shoes and the discarded socks.
The man himself lay in the bed.

For a long while we just stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin.
The body had apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that
outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded him. What was left of
him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in
which he lay; and upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the
patient and biding dust.

Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head One of us
lifted something from it, and leaving forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the
nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-grey hair.

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"A Rose for Emily" - William Faulkner

Questions

1 . Does this story contain elements that you associate with Gothic traditions in horror stories
or mystery stories? What makes it an example of Southern Gothic fiction?

2. When you first read the story, when did you realize how it would end? What is your
response to the end?

3. After you read the ending, did your view of earlier scenes change, such as the parts about
buying poison and the odour? In retrospect, where are there hints about the plot?

4. What is the conflict in this story? If Miss Emily is the protagonist, who is the antagonist (a
character or force that acts against the protagonist, denying his or her desires)?

5. In the beginning, Miss Emily receives a deputation from the Board of Aldermen. We
already know her attitude toward taxes before this. If this anecdote does not advance the
plot or offer a clue to the eventual story of Emily and her lover, what function does it serve
in the story?

6. Does your view of the narrator affect your reception of the story? Why does Faulkner use
this particular narrator? What do you know about him? Can you list his "values," and if so,
are they shared by the town? Is this narrator reliable? Does the fact he is male matter?

7. In paragraphs 1 and 2, the author speaks of buildings and structures, describing Miss Emily
as a fallen monument. Where else do related images occur? If Miss Emily is a fallen
monument, to what is she a monument?

8. Notice references to the Civil War in this story. Where do they occur? How does that war
play a role in the story?

9. In this story, an aristocratic Southerner murders a Yankee carpetbagger. Is the story about
the triumph of a defeated South over a supposedly triumphant North? What is this story
really about?

10. See question 4. If you are tempted to think of Homer Barron as antagonist, does it matter
that the story continues thirty years after his death? (Remember that conflict in stories
does not necessarily occur between individuals.)

1 1 . In paragraph 15, what do horse and foot mean? To what or to whom is Miss Emily being
compared here?

12. What is the significance of sidewalks?

13. What do you think happened when the Baptist minister called on Miss Emily? Is it
important that you think you understand what happened?

14. Why are we not surprised when Homer disappears? How does the storyteller ensure that
we are not surprised?

15. After reading, reconstruct the sequence of events. When did Homer Barron die? How did
he die? Why is the story structured in the way that it is?

16. It has been said of this story that "Miss Emily has a shadow, and by this shadow we tell the
time of her life." What is her shadow?

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17. Why do we need to know about Miss Emily's hair changing colour?

18. Had Miss Emily really shut up the top floor of her house? Why does the narrator say
"evidently"?

19. What purpose is served by telling us that the Negro "walked right through the house and
out the back and was not seen again"?

20. Toward the end is a lyrical and metaphorical account of the old people's sense of the past,
a poetic kind of prose with which a self-indulgent author will sometimes pad out a story or
tease us by delaying the resolution of our suspense. What is Faulkner doing here?
Playing a trick on us? Does this image present an alternative or parallel to anything else in
the story?

21 . Why did they wait until after the funeral to open the closed room? What word in the story
informs you about the reasons for this delay? Is the delay consistent with the world of this
story?

22. Discuss the ways in which Faulkner uses Miss Emily's house as an appropriate setting and
as a metaphor for both her and the themes established by the narrative.

23. What are the different uses of the themes of "love," "honor," and "respectability" in the
story?

24. Many critics have read Miss Emily as a symbol of the post-Civil-War South. Discuss the
advantages and disadvantages of adopting this stance.

25. Those of you who have read Charles Dickens's Great Expectations will see a resemblance.
How does Faulkner's tale echo but also differ significantly from Dickens'?

26. How does this story handle the linked themes of female oppression and empowerment?
What does it say about the various kinds of male-female relationships in American society
of this period?

27. What is the significance of the title?

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